The Northern Rockies Ecosystem Protection Act (NREPA), a bill that would give permanent Wilderness protection to 23-million acres of roadless lands in Idaho, Wyoming, Montana, Oregon and Washington has just been introduced in the U.S. Senate by Senator Sheldon Whitehouse and 7 other senators, including Harry Reid of Nevada and Barbara Boxer of California. The House version of NREPA was introduced last year and currently has 37 co-sponsors. 

What follows is an article about today’s NREPA introduction in the Senate from Friends of the Wild Clearwater. – mk

Washington D.C.- U.S. Senator Sheldon Whitehouse (D-RI) introduced the Northern Rockies Ecosystem Protection Act (NREPA) in the Senate yesterday. The bill, S 3022, would give permanent wilderness protection to 23-million acres of America’s premier roadless lands in Idaho, Wyoming, Montana, Oregon and Washington, as well as designate about 1,800-miles of rivers and streams as Wild and Scenic. Fellow co-sponsors included: Sen. Boxer (D-CA), Sen. Durbin (D-IL), Sen. Markey (D-MA), Sen. Menendez (D-NJ), Sen. Reid (D-NV) Sen. Schumer (D-NY), and Sen. Shaheen (D-NH).

“We all depend on our forests and rivers for our health and wellbeing,” said Senator Whitehouse. “This legislation would preserve an important and productive wilderness for future generations, secure important habitat for wildlife, and help to reduce climate change in the process.”

Brett Haverstick, Education & Outreach Director for Friends of the Clearwater welcomed news of the legislation being introduced in the Senate. “Some of the most biologically diverse and important roadless wildlands and rivers in the Lower 48 are located in the Clearwater Basin of north-central Idaho. Future generations will look back one day and thank our elected leaders for permanently protecting some of the best wild country left in America.”

Singer-songwriter Carole King added that many Americans don’t know their taxpayer dollars are being used to destroy the last of these incredibly beautiful and important wild places that are owned by all Americans. “One result of not having NREPA has been a tremendous loss of populations among species such as wolverine, lynx, grizzly bear, fluvial Arctic grayling and bull trout. Plus protecting the Northern Rockies Greater Ecosystems will attract tourists from around the world, and, unlike logging, tourism is a sustainable economy that will benefit local communities for generations to come.”

Congresswoman Maloney said, “I’m pleased Sen. Whitehouse has brought NREPA to the attention of the Senate. This region’s native plants and animals are worthy of our country’s highest protective status for wild lands as permanent wilderness. NREPA will protect natural biological corridors, connect whole ecosystems, and restore more than 1-million acres of damaged habitat and watersheds.”

Mike Garrity, Executive Director of the Alliance for the Wild Rockies thanked Senator Whitehouse and all of the cosponsors for introducing NREPA in the Senate. “The Northern Rockies are headwaters to three of our country’s major waterways that provide water to tens of millions of Americans — the mighty Columbia, Colorado and Missouri Rivers,” Mike Garrity explained. “The drinking water crisis in Flint, Michigan, has reminded us just how essential clean water is to human health. These headwaters, which provide some of the cleanest water on the planet, deserve to be designated as permanent wilderness.”

Garrity also emphasized that the Northern Rockies Ecosystem Protection Act will save taxpayers millions of dollars annually by eliminating wasteful subsidies to the logging industry while protecting the vast forests that are some of our nation’s best and most effective tools to fight global warming. ”National Forests absorb an astounding 10% of the carbon that America creates and unlogged and old growth forests absorb the most carbon,” Garrity explained. “It makes no sense for Congress to continue to subsidize logging the nation’s few remaining roadless areas that President Clinton worked to protect with his Roadless Rule.”

Read the news release of NREPA being introduced in the House.

See a map of NREPA.

Learn more about NREPA.

That’s the title of an article from High Country News.

“The concept is to carefully thin forests on both public and private lands to reduce the intensity of wildfires, preventing the kind of inferno that erupted in the Las Conchas fire and protecting water systems from wildfire’s catastrophic aftermath.”

Funding comes from several sources, not just the USFS:

“The effort, called the Rio Grande Water Fund, has support from 52 cities, counties, water utilities and other groups. To date, the 2-year-old fund has raised $1.5 million and its partners have raised $7.4 million to treat a total of roughly 10,000 acres throughout the watershed of the Rio Grande River, from just south of Albuquerque to the Colorado border. Early money to kickstart the fund came from, among others: the U.S. Forest Service, a foundation run by hardware store Lowe’s, the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation and the Wyoming-based LOR Foundation (which also has provided financial support for the project for which this story was produced).”

The Nature Conservancy is playing a big role. Anyone here know what the Center Biological Diversity and other groups think of this?

This article from the Ravalli Republic, “Bitterroot Forest looking for resolution on timber project,” notes that “Once that project is completed, nearly all of the national forest lands that border private ground on the west side of the Bitterroot Valley will have been thinned.” That sounds like the Bitterroot NF folks have been successful in planing and carrying out other projects.

The FONSI says:

I have decided to authorize commercial and non-commercial forest treatments, including prescribed
burning, on approximately 2,327 acres of National Forest in the Westside project area. My decision
includes the construction of approximately 3.8 miles of permanent National Forest System road and
3.8 miles of temporary road, treatments in the Selway-Bitterroot Inventoried Roadless Area (IRA), the
application of design features and best management practices (Table DN-4, Appendix A), and Forest
Plan amendments for elk habitat effectiveness, coarse woody debris, and visual quality (Appendix B).
The new permanent road will be closed year-long to motorized travel and the temporary roads will be
reclaimed following use. These treatments will improve forest conditions and long-term
administrative access in the project area.

Commercial harvest would occur on 1,349 acres:
· 506 acres would be treated with improvement cuts (22 acres in the Selway-Bitterroot IRA)
· 799 acres would be treated with irregular harvest cuts
· commercial volume would be removed from 44 of the 92 acres of aspen treatment

Non-commercial timber would be removed from about 978 acres:
· understory ponderosa pine and Douglas-fir would be removed from 666 acres of forest (139
· 206 acres of ponderosa pine plantation
· 58 acres for meadow restoration

Some comments on my charts showing the results of national forest non-management have contended that I’ve placed too much emphasis on reduced tangible and material outputs (renewable energy, wood and paper products) and on adverse economic and social impacts (jobs lost, stressed families,
communities and local governments) . Critics claimed that the non-material results of “hands off” management were being ignored.

In an attempt to remedy this imbalance I offer the following .The ruffed grouse (Bonasa umbellus) is widely used by wildlife biologists, both in the eastern and western U.S., as an indicator species for assessing the status of wildlife habitat and the ecological diversity of upland forests. The chart demonstrates the effect of virtual non-management of the timber resource on this key species in the Nantahala-Pisgah National Forest,(N-P), the mountain national forest in North Carolina. According to the N.C.Wildlife Resources Commission 2015 annual report, “By all measures, grouse hunting during the 2014-15 season was the poorest on record”.

The U.S. Forest Service is currently creating about 500 acres per year of early successional habitat through regeneration cuts (clearcut, shelterwood, and group selection). This comprises about .06% of the 908,700 acres of unreserved timberland found on the forest. An additional + 100 acres is thinned annually with varying beneficial impacts on ground cover. The acreage of prescribed burn has increased steadily since 1995 and now averages about 10,000 acres annually. While this treatment promotes the development of early successional habitat, its aggregate impact is difficult to assess as effects vary widely with fire intensity, ambient temperature, stand density, season of year, timber type, and ground cover.

Good quality early successional habitat can best be produced by well-designed regeneration harvests. Current management of the N-P produces about 500 acres annually of this habitat. Maintenance of suitable grouse habitat and the age class diversity essential to forest health requires, at a minimum, treatment of ~.5 % (about 4500 acres for the N-P) of the forested area annually. While the report focuses on grouse, be aware that  the decline of early succession habitat is adversely affecting not only grouse, but of other game and non-game species such as woodcock, white-tailed deer, wild turkey, golden-winged, prairie, and cerulean warblers, Bewick’s wren, yellow-breasted chat and a host of others (See Hunter et al, Wildlife Society Bulletin 29(2) 440-445)

The summer 2001 edition of the Wildlife Society Bulletin, a peer-reviewed journal of the professional organization of American wildlife biologists, contained a series of 8 articles. These examined in depth the changes in habitat and wildlife populations that are resulting from current non-management of wildlands in the eastern United States. The authors reached the unanimous conclusion that, considering both game and non-game species, more intensive management is urgently needed and that the continuation of the current “hands-off” policies would result in “the loss of some of the most interesting and diverse natural communities in eastern North America”. The habitat-population chart suggests that this prognosis is becoming a reality.

It should be noted that the Nantahala-Pisgah N.F. has 105,000 acres of Wilderness and Wilderness Study areas and the neighboring Great Smoky Mountain National Park has 522,000 acres of forest land on which timber harvesting is prohibited.  

Mac McConnell

May, 2016

A new report from the Swan View Coalition in Montana gives a thorough rundown on how the Flathead National Forest in particular – and the Forest Service and Congress in general – are using the Collaborative Forest Landscape Restoration Program (CFLRP) and other collaboration and “restoration” initiatives to keep its bloated road system and fool the public into thinking the problem in America’s forests is too many trees and not too many roads.

For those involved in bull trout and water quality issues, the report also documents ongoing road-related travesties in Bunker, Sullivan, Coal, and other key watersheds on the Flathead National Forest. The report also describes how the Flathead National Forest is trying to cheat its way out of road decommissioning and begin to instead rebuild roads decommissioned previously.

Read the full report here.

Executive Summary

In order to protect water quality and fish, the Flathead National Forest is required to either remove or monitor annually all culverts and bridges in roads closed in threatened bull trout habitat. Similarly, the Flathead is required to develop a monitoring plan for each road it chooses to simply close in providing Security Core habitat for threatened grizzly bear, rather than conducting the preferred reclamation by removing all stream-crossing structures.

Our investigation finds the Flathead has developed none of the required stream-crossing monitoring plans for roads closed to provide Security Core. Nor has it annually monitored stream-crossing structures on closed roads in bull trout habitat. Though the Forest Service set forth these requirements and the need for them, the Flathead has failed to implement them. Rather than correct the problem, it has instead set upon a course to do away with such requirements – as culverts and bridges continue to fail on roads both open and closed to motor vehicles.

This report will discuss how the Flathead tracks its roads and stream-crossing structures, discuss how it does and does not monitor them, and provide examples of the consequences when it fails to adequately manage them. It will conclude with recommendations on how to get the effort back on track rather than abandon it to the detriment of fish, wildlife and taxpayers.

Subscribers here, I thought, might be interested to know that the documentary video titled, “Counties in Crisis – final cut,” is now available at YouTube, here:  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q-7vAAUaPio.   Incidentally, the full text of the video’s script is also available at the Not Without a Fight! blog, here:  https://countieswithnationalforests.wordpress.com/2015/12/15/the-script-counties-in-crisis/.  Thanks!  Ron Roizen